Surgical procedures are used to treat and cure a wide range of diseases, conditions, and injuries. Surgery often requires access to internal tissue through open or minimally invasive surgical procedures. The term “minimally invasive” refers to a wide range of surgical procedures including laparoscopic, arthroscopic, endoscopic, natural orifice intraluminal, and natural orifice transluminal procedures. Minimally invasive surgery can have numerous advantages compared to traditional open surgical procedures, including reduced trauma, faster recovery, reduced risk of infection, and reduced scarring. During some minimally invasive procedures, trocars can be used to provide a port through which endoscopic surgical instruments are passed into a patient's body.
Development in minimally invasive surgery has resulted in increasingly complex procedures that require multiple instruments and precise manipulations within the body. Because of the limited access space afforded by a trocar and the relatively larger wound size associated therewith, one solution has been the use of percutaneous surgical instruments inserted directly into a body cavity and used to supplement instruments introduced through one or more trocars. For example, procedures have been developed that involve additional percutaneous instruments to aid in retracting organs and structures. In other procedures, one or more percutaneous instruments having removable end effectors are utilized in combination with a trocar that can accommodate the passage of various end effectors. Inserting surgical instruments percutaneously, i.e., passing directly through tissue without an access device, can further reduce trauma and scarring to the patient by reducing the size of the wound created.
The increasing use of percutaneously inserted surgical instruments is not without challenges, however. For example, using an increasing number of these instruments can require an increased number of operators to handle and position the devices during a procedure. A surgeon or other user cannot, by way of further example, position an instrument as desired and then leave the instrument unattended while they attend to operating another, or several other, instruments.
Accordingly, there is a need for devices and methods that allow a user to selectively maintain a percutaneous surgical instrument in a desired position and/or orientation such that the user can free their hands for other tasks.